Pam Bondi CONCEDES DEFEAT in STUNNING announcement

I'm joined now by All Rise News' Adam Klasfeld. Adam, we have a rare concession of defeat by the Trump administration, specifically his DOJ. Can you explain what just happened out of the mouth of Pam Bondi? Pam Bondi has announced that Lindsey Halligan, the former masquerading U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, is out. That this follows a federal judge's ruling that Halligan, remember, is the same person who brought the failed cases against James Comey and Letitia James and was brought on to the Eastern District of Virginia specifically for that purpose. After fighting tooth and nail to keep a first-time unqualified prosecutor in that position, they finally bit the bullet. They blinked, and she is out. Why would the Trump administration do this? This is an administration that has staked so much of its credibility on this idea that they're never going to accept defeat, certainly never going to concede defeat. And so in this instance, why was it so important to them to say, you know what, the court says that Lindsey Halligan was improperly appointed, so we're going to just kind of lay down our arms and take her out of this position? Well, it's the laws of gravity, Brian, because what we've seen throughout Trump's second term is that when the courts stand up to a bully, the bully folds. And we've seen that in the case of Kilmar-Abriga-Garcia, for example. Kilmar-Abriga-Garcia, it took five court orders to get him out of an El Salvador prison C-COP. They said that he would never, ever step foot on U.S. soil after they brought him to U.S. soil. After he's in criminal detention, he wins pretrial release. After he wins pretrial release, they put him in immigration detention. And after all of this noise saying that we're going to, that the courts cannot control this, you cannot order us to let him be on U.S. soil, he's currently awaiting trial in U.S. soil. And why Lindsey Halligan? Why give up the ghost in that fight now? They ran out of options. Her temporary tenure ran to a close. It's supposed to be a 120-day interim tenure, even if she were legitimately appointed, which she was not. There was a binding court order disqualifying her. They tried an interpretation of that order that would allow her to remain in that office after her humiliating defeats for the entire purpose that she's there, to prosecute two of Trump's enemies. And after that fails, and after a judge warns not only Halligan, but Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, that they can all face professional discipline if they all continue to insist that she is acting as a U.S. attorney when she is not legally allowed to serve on that basis, that's when they give up the ghost, because they ran out of options, gravity caught up to them. They had to fold. Do you think that there was any sense from Lindsey Halligan herself that imperiling her own law license might not be worth just this fool's errand of continuing to serve in this position where all of her prosecutions would get swatted down anyway? I mean, the reality is we know that no judges were buying anything with her name signed on it. And so it was symbolic as it was. But now she was dealing with the increasing threat of her own law license for the rest of her life getting taken away. And that's her livelihood. I'm sure that she knew if she continued in that position, she'd face a virtual certainty of a referral for disciplinary proceedings because a federal judge told her that that day. And on the same day, just hours before that ruling, when a federal judge said, if you persist in masquerading, I'm using his language now, masquerading in this charade that you are a U.S. attorney, that you will be referred for possible discipline, that he will initiate disciplinary proceedings, that that happened today. Hours before then, the chief judge of the district posted a job listing for her replacement. So I think that the double whammy of that, the writing couldn't have been more clearly spelled on the wall. And Pam Bondi gave her a really lofty sendoff about the wonderful job she did in that district in 120 days when she blew their two most high profile cases, humiliated herself in court again and again, didn't know basic grand jury procedure to the extent that she let most of the grand jury out of the room before they can attest to the actual indictment, their votes on the indictment. It's humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat, followed by certain danger. So I want to talk about whoever is foolish enough to take over her position. We know that that position was was filled solely because Lindsey Halligan would present herself as some lackey perfectly willing to kowtow to Pam Bondi and Donald Trump and try to engage in these vindictive prosecutions. There is a lot of risk for a prosecutor to engage in this stuff knowing full well that even if they were appointed properly, which she was not, that they would that they would face almost certain defeat because the case for vindictive prosecution against Letitia James and James Comey and on and on and on is so strong. And so does that make it less likely that there's going to be some hack prosecutor who's willing to step up and fill this void knowing that they're basically just going to, you know, this is like the equivalence of just putting yourself on the front lines in like World War One and expecting to survive. So is it going to be less likely that there's some prosecutor who's going to be willing to do that? Or on the flip side, do you think based on what you've seen from this administration that there's always some hack prosecutor that's going to be drawn in, drawn in by proximity to power, who's going to be perfectly content to, you know, sacrifice their own livelihood, their own reputation, their own law license, so long as they could spend a few minutes groveling at the feet of dear leader Donald Trump? Moth always loves the flame until it's too late. I mean, let's just look at the history and it's as old as Trump's first term. You had Michael Cohen, you had, you know, you have Rudy Giuliani. How many people have incinerated their careers? I mean, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, and that's just, you know, that's the attorneys. Then you have Gordon Sondland, Kayleigh McEnany, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Pence, Rex Tillerson, all of these people Trump has thrown onto the bus the moment they lose their political usefulness. And these are people who hitch their wagons to the Trump train only to watch themselves fall out of favor with him the moment that they can no longer be of use to him. The thing that I would think, I would advise people to keep a close eye on, especially in light of today's news and Pam Bondi, and excuse me, Lindsey Halligan's replacement. Look at what the judges of the Eastern District of Virginia do in the coming days, because right now they're trying to fill Lindsey Halligan's position. And the line prosecutors of the Eastern District of Virginia, they could not find a single person in the district to take the cases against James Comey and Letitia James. All of them didn't want to touch this with a 10-foot pole. And right now the judges are looking for her replacement. Do they replace her with a qualified person? And if they do that, does Trump fire that person and start the process again? So I think her replacement, you know, maybe we'll see a competent prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia with the judges in charge. And knowing the actual stable of prosecutors who are not political appointees, but career civil servants who have been there from across multiple administrations, will the judges have their say? And if so, will Trump try to muck it up? So I want you to dig into that a little bit, because I'm actually unfamiliar with this process. Is it the judges who choose U.S. attorneys for each respective district, and then Trump has to either fire them or leave them in place? Or is it Trump who appoints these U.S. attorneys, and then the judges get to vote on whether or not they want to keep those people in place? So the most U.S. attorneys are appointed by the president of the United States, but they need to have the advice and consent of the Senate, something that Trump could never get for Lindsey Halligan and the other U.S. attorneys who have been disqualified. Now Trump likes to complain and claim that, oh, he can't get the blue slip in blue states like Virginia, that it's Democratic senators who are holding this up. But let's get real. In Trump's first term, it was never a problem to get bipartisan support across the Senate for qualified candidates, because in other administrations, we saw U.S. attorneys as people who would follow the law and not be political hatchet men. Trump's real complaint, the reason why the advice and consent of the Senate is so hard for him, is because he is trying to appoint the likes of Lindsey Halligan, his former attorney, his former White House aide who has no prosecutorial experience, people who would not get support from the Senate. And so why are the judges stepping in? Because that is essentially the reserve manner in which you can appoint a U.S. attorney if the interim appointment fails, that the interim appointment is supposed to last, it's interim for a reason, it's supposed to last 120 days, at which time either that candidate gets the approval of the judges of the district or the advice and consent of the Senate. If neither happens, then the judges can decide, the judges can appoint someone. But that is, we're only at this stage because Trump has failed to put in qualified people in offices where he's installing people to be his hatchet men and women. Adam, you know that if the Trump administration had to swallow this loss, that they're going to fume about it, they're going to be irate about the fact that Lindsey Halligan wasn't allowed to continue in her role. And it's not like the Trump administration to just say, oh well, them's the rules and so we'll just have to, you know, abide by them and hopefully the next time it works out better. These are people for whom if the rules don't work, then you change the rules, you obliterate the rules, you flip the rules on their head and you make up your own rules. And so as we proceed into this process, recognizing the importance that the Eastern District of Virginia has, especially as it relates to these vindictive prosecutions that Trump wants to engage in, do you presume that Pam Bondi and Trump will just kind of cross their fingers and hope that it all works out well next time? Or do you think that we're going to see some upending of the rules here and them try and shoehorn in some prosecutor in some other way, even if they can't get what they want through regular course of order? I think that they're going to try some shenanigans. But I also talk about the law that I mentioned earlier, the law of gravity. They have tried their bag of tricks. They have tried to a large extent to go on the attack against the judge whose order led to the ouster of Lindsey Halligan, basically writing a legal brief that went on the full attack against him, said that he was leading an inquisition, said that he made rudimentary and elementary errors in the law. As a matter of fact, in the ruling that had warned Halligan about disciplinary proceedings being opened up against her if she kept masquerading as a U.S. attorney, he had mentioned that this legal brief, which was co-signed by Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, this legal brief, he said, was more fitting for a cable news talk show, that it was so full of vitriol in his words, that it's not something that he expects from litigants in his courtroom, let alone the Department of Justice. So to answer your question, Brian, do I think that Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi are going to see the error of their ways? No. But they are seeing that their options are getting increasingly limited in this particular fight. Well, look, we'll take the good news where we can get it. And more good news is that Adam covers all of this stuff on his newsletter, All Rise News. So I'm going to put the link to All Rise News right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video. If you want to hear more from him, stay up to date on the most breaking legal news as it breaks. I highly recommend that you subscribe to All Rise News. Again, that link is right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video. Adam, as always, thanks for the time. Thanks, Brian. Always a pleasure.